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Visual Arts

Visual Arts Exhibition

November 18-25, 2011,

Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi

Inauguration

November 18, 2011, 7 pm

Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi

The theme of this year's NQF, ‘Body Politics’ will hopefully provoke us into thinking about how sexuality can be the basis of an inclusive and interconnected politics, as we collectively explore and discover how our bodies are central to our imagination of ourselves and our politics.

Join us to see the photos, collages, illustrations, drawings and more that the queer community has created in response to this theme!

Photo Panel

November 24, 2011, 7 pm

Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi

An illustrated talk by Frank Wagner which will demonstrate that images are not neutral but central to the political debates around the production and dissemination of culture; debates that Nigah is part of in its role as a queer collective using media and the arts to provoke discussion around sexuality, AIDS and gender.

Experiences of curating the queer exhibitions "The Eighth Square – Gender, Life and Desire in the Visual Arts since 1960" at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and "Gewoon anders – just Different“ at the Cobra Museum, Amsterdam.

Upon displacing masculine/feminine and hetero/homosexual dialectics, queer, transgender and post-colonial movements question the dominant historiography and its forms of visibility. After the AIDS crisis and the absorption of identity politics in the instruments of normalisation, new forms of activism and intervention in the public sphere have been structured which arise from uses branching off from the technologies of production and identity. The lecture will present two exhibition experiences in major German and Dutch art museums and it describes how they differed from each other.

Frank Wagner has organized several shows about gender and sexuality within the last 23 years. The first one - VollBILD AIDS - took place in (West-) Berlin in 1988 and had been the first show about Art and Aids in Europe at that time. The most recent one took place at the COBRA/Museum in Amsterdam in 2008. He will mainly talk about the exhibition "The Eighth Square - Gender, Life, and Desire in the Arts since 1960" which I curated in 2006 at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. It has been by way the largest show and it was the first queer show in Germany in a museum (about “non-heteronormative”, “marginalized sexuality”), not only of that scale but ever. It shows in a quite plastic way the politics of representation between grand gala and the less glittering sometimes undercover, sometimes pushed aside everyday, which Frank Wagner placed the artworks throughout the whole museum.

About Nigah

Nigah is a non-funded queer collective that works on issues of gender and sexuality. Apart from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, we understand queer to be any identity, politics or process that challenges dominant norms. Based in Delhi since 2003, we try to create inclusive and safe queer spaces using media, workshops and discussions. We organise events each month and entry to all the events is free.